Remembrance

Nov10

Sally Minogue reflects on remembrance and Remembrance, with reference to the post First World War fiction of Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf.

One of the happy chances
of my life is that Canterbury Cathedral is on my doorstep, and I regularly take
a walk in its 14th/early 15th century Great Cloister (or as I think of it, the
cloisters), either in the early morning, or at dusk, just as the traceries of
the cloister arches and the soaring Perpendicular of Bell Harry Tower begin to
be illuminated. It is almost always quiet at those times – in the morning, the
stonemasons sometimes gather there, looking like mountaineers with their ropes
and belays, ready for serious business. I pay them close attention, mindful of
Hardy’s Jude, and of Sue looking straight through him (‘she no more observed
his presence than that of the dust-motes which his manipulations raised into
the sunbeams’.) In the evening, there is often a carolling blackbird, or the tolling
of a bell, sounds which seem to complement the silence rather than break it. As
an atheist, my own business there is not religious, and my walk is practical –
a sort of constitutional, five times one way round the cloister and five times
the other. But there is something about the close acquaintance with ancient
stonework, the worn slabs reminding me of those treading the same path over
many centuries, the grace of the fan vaulting, the occasional punctuation of
stained glass in the arches, that lends these walks a naturally meditative quality.
In the days leading up to November 11th, my reflections have been
turning to remembrance.

In one corner of the cloisters
is a large board on the wall, just next to the side door leading in to the main
Cathedral – in design and aesthetic, much like a school Honours Board – which
holds the names of all those from the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers who
died in the First World War. This stands right next to the doorway (pre-dating
the current cloisters) which was apparently used by Archbishop Thomas Beckett to
enter the Cathedral on the day of his martyrdom. This board, unlike some war
memorials, distinguishes casualties in terms of Officers, Non-Commissioned
Officers and Other Ranks. But it is also careful to categorise those who were
Killed in Action, by far the longest list and at the head of the board,
followed by Died of Wounds, Died Whilst Prisoners of War, Died on Active
Service and finally that elusive category – the Missing Presumed Dead. The
hierarchy of value is explicit.

Cathedrals have always
been repositories of monuments to those killed in war; this is most evident in
St Michael’s Chapel inside the Cathedral, known as The Warriors’ Chapel, with
its many rather weary and ragged
regimental colours of The Buffs, the Royal East Kent Regiment (now defunct),
who inspired the byword for military
steadfastness, ‘Steady the Buffs!’ Here it is hard to avoid the feeling
that Church and State conspire to uphold the values of masculine
self-sacrifice.

I have taken some time to
build a picture here, without reference to literature, because I want to
suggest that the period leading up to the anniversary of the Armistice date,
and Remembrance Day itself, have become somehow petrified in tradition. The
Cathedral monuments to those killed in war (many predating the First World War,
but redolent with the names of imperial conflicts which are once more in the
news) are material icons of this. The ubiquitous red poppy leaves no room to
combine respect for those who died with a critical attitude to the
circumstances of their death. The two minutes’ silence cannot be broken by any
form of dissent; and to remain silent is to assent to a particular way of
remembering. Conversely, if we look at the fiction which came immediately out
of the First World War, we see a complication and questioning of the whole
business of how to remember the dead and the conflict in which they died. Here
is the inner consciousness of Christopher Tietjens, Ford Madox Ford’s ‘hero’,
in the first pages of ‘No More Parades’, the second volume of the tetralogy Parade’s End:

Intense dejection,
endless muddles, endless follies, endless villainies. All these men given into
the hands of the most cynically care-free intriguers in long corridors who made
plots that harrowed the hearts of the world. All these men toys, all these
agonies mere occasions for picturesque phrases to be put into politicians’
speeches without heart or even intelligence. Hundreds of thousands of men
tossed here and there in that sordid and gigantic mud-brownness of midwinter .
. . by God, exactly as if they were nuts wilfully picked up and thrown over the
shoulder by magpies. . . . But men. Not just populations. Men you worried over
there. Each man a man with a backbone, knees, breeches, braces, a rifle, a
home, passions, fornications, drunks, pals, some scheme of the universe, corns,
inherited diseases, a green-grocer’s business, a milk walk, a paper stall,
brats, a slut of a wife. . . . The Men: the Other Ranks! And the poor – little
officers. God help them. Vice-Chancellor’s Latin prize men.

Ford immediately makes
clear that any standard distinction between officers and other ranks is not
just invidious, it is utterly meaningless. All are as nuts to be ‘wilfully
picked up and thrown over the shoulder by magpies’. ‘No More Parades’ was
published in 1925, the same year that Virginia Woolf published Mrs. Dalloway. Scarcely could the
origins of these novels have been more different. Ford had served in the war,
enlisting at the age of 41 and serving as an officer in key battles at the
Front. Woolf, by gender necessarily a non-combatant, shows in her diaries a
somewhat disengaged attitude to the cataclysmic events around her, and in her
fiction, the war is dealt with in a sideways manner. Yet, like Ford, she
produces some of the most imaginative insights into the effects of the First
World War, whilst also reflecting on the human condition as it exists at an
angle to the specifics of the historical moment.

Mrs.
Dalloway is ostensibly about Clarissa Dalloway’s party; but
that is the froth on the surface of the interior lives illuminated by Woolf’s
modernist methods. Throughout the novel, a parallel is observed between the
socialite Mrs Dalloway, planning her party, and the war survivor Septimus
Evans. Both are haunted by death, which lurks beneath the novel’s surface,
bubbling up in Clarissa’s consciousness through Shakespeare’s elegiac ‘Fear no
more the heat o’ the sun’. For Septimus it takes the solid form of his dead comrade
Evans, who appears to him in Regent’s Park, and is more real, more meaningful
to him than his wife Rezia. The war has disjointed Septimus from himself; only
the apparition of Evans seizes him. But likewise Clarissa Dalloway is
disjointed from herself, for no other reason than the existential awareness of
the void underlying life itself. By putting Septimus and Clarissa on a par,
Woolf shows us the equal frailty of their grasp on life, their shared
understanding of that frailty. The explosion which happens within Septimus is
only a version of the existential explosion which can happen to any human
consciousness.

Ford foregrounds the
material conditions of the First World War to give an account of its effects on
those who directly participated, but he uses the war to speak in a more general
way about the way humans inhabit the world. Woolf emphasises first the human
consciousness as it encounters the material conditions of existence, which
happen to include those of the war but are not confined to that. A society
woman organising her party can experience the same acute sense of the abyss of
death as Septimus, survivor of the horrors of war. As modernists, both
novelists strive to find new ways of using language to meet the demands of
expressing acute and extraordinary states of being. They are nothing if not
complicated.

The rituals of
Remembrance Day leave no room for complication, except in the internal space we
each occupy. The writers who responded in the aftermath of the war can help us
with the imaginative effort needed. Here is Ford again, recounting Tietjens’
inner thoughts about the death of O Nine Morgan (note the care taken to avoid
using that over-generalised phrase ‘the dead’):

And at the thought
of the man as he was alive and of him now, dead, an immense blackness descended
all over Tietjens. He said to himself: I
am very tired. Yet he was not ashamed. . . . It was the blackness that
descends on you when you think of your dead. . . . It comes, at any time, over
the brightness of sunlight, in the grey of the evening, in the grey of the
dawn, at mess, on parade; it comes at the thought of one man, or the thought of
half a battalion that you have seen, stretched out, under sheeting, the noses
making little pimples; or not stretched out, lying face downwards, half buried.
Or at the thought of dead that you have never seen dead at all. . . . Suddenly
the light goes out. . . . In this case it was because of one fellow, a dirty
enough man, not even very willing, not in the least endearing, certainly contemplating
desertion. . . . But your dead . . . yours
. . . your own. As if joined to your identity by a black cord. . . . (Part IV
of ‘No More Parades’)

The
rituals of Remembrance do make their own efforts to reconnect us with the past.
But in the space between Remembrance and remembrance, we can each try to retie
that black cord to ourselves, and re-imagine our own dead.

The ellipses in the
quotations from Parade’s End are Ford
Madox Ford’s.

Reference to Thomas
Hardy, Jude the Obscure, is to
Chapter 2 of Section 2 of the novel, ‘At Christminster’.